The Poverty of Our Educational Statistics

Some years ago Business Insider called the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis' Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED) database "The Most Amazing Economics Website in the World." Want to have your choice of measurements of inflation in June 1953? How about manufacturing employment in Michigan--or maybe just auto manufacturing in the Detroit-Warren-Dearborn metro area--in December 1999? Or how post-tax corporate profits in the fourth quarter of 2008 compared with those of the same quarter in the preceding five years? Offering 800,000+ time series FRED may not quite offer the answers to every question a researcher may have, for whom simply having access to statistics is likely to be a starting point, but putting so much a quick keyword search away it sure is handy.

One might think that in this age of relentless data-hoovering, ever more abundant computing power and widespread statistical training one would, on examining any public issue, especially one as hotly contested as education (they even made the first season of House of Cards about it!), easily find a web site that, in at least some degree, does for American education what the Federal Reserve does with FRED.

If one thinks that then they are wrong. Very, very wrong. Someone looking for something so readily countable as, for example, the number of unfilled openings in the country's schools is likely to have a hard time getting even the most elementary data (never mind a FRED-like wealth of time series)--as the recent arguments about teacher shortages show. (Simply put, people give us numbers about unfilled positions in this school system or that state--but no one seems to have anything to compare them to, to tell us if things are normal, getting worse, even getting better.)

That this is so little talked about--that so few realize that this is the case--can seem to imply that not many people have gone looking for such numbers; that in fact those who have gone looking for what can seem very basic information for anyone trying to come to any conclusions about these matters are much fewer in number than those crowding the media and the Web with their "opinions."